‘The Gospel of Truth is joy to those who have received grace from the Father of truth, that they may know him in the power of the Word who came forth from the fullness in the thought and mind of the Father’ (1.1). In its very first sentence the Gospel of Truth announces the single theme that runs through the entire text. There are no prefatory remarks, no indications as to who is speaking here or to whom, in the manner of a Pauline letter. Other gospel texts begin, appropriately enough, with the word ‘beginning’. The Gospel of Mark announces ‘the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God’ and identifies that beginning with the ministry of John the Baptist, who proclaimed the way of the Lord and so fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy (1.1–8). In the Gospel of John, the beginning echoes the Book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created …’ is now accompanied by the explanation that ‘in the beginning was the Word’ (Gen 1.1; GJohn 1.1). In their different ways the Markan and Johannine evangelists both establish a scriptural reference point that connects their narratives to a more comprehensive context. While the opening of the Gospel of Truth shares the term ‘gospel’ with Mark’s prologue and other key terms with John’s (‘truth’, ‘grace’, ‘Word’, ‘fullness’), there is here no external reference point. The Word conceived in the mind of the Father and then uttered by him is, simply, Jesus, who came into the world to make the Father known to his elect and so to liberate them from ignorance and error.

The rhetorical power of this text is evident from the start. The author writes in the total assurance that he has access to the truth of the gospel, and that he is in a position to communicate it to his intended readers or hearers. They must have known who he was; the fact that he does nothing to state his own credentials suggests that he already enjoys an established reputation as an inspirational preacher and teacher. Unknown to us, he was well known to them. Equally unknown to us are those first readers themselves, for the text provides only minimal information as to who they were and where they were located. While a modern reader may sense the power of the author’s rhetoric and be struck by the boldness of his theological claims, the apparent lack of contextual information may seem disorienting. Yet this lack is by no means unique to GTruth – on the contrary, it is the norm in all of our engagement with early Christian literature, including the writings that came to form the New Testament. We never know all that we would like to know, but there is always much to be gained through careful reading of the texts on their own terms and in relation to other comparable texts. That at least is the assumption underlying the present book. Reading and reflecting on GTruth brings to light a remarkable and under-appreciated product of early Christian theological imagination, and it also generates new insight into the theological choices made by better known Christian authors as they sought to interpret the Christian message for their diverse audiences.

If the GTruth is under-appreciated, it is because it remains little known except to specialists – in sharp contrast to the Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered at the same time and place yet enjoying far greater recognition and popularity. Both texts are preserved in translations from Greek originals into Coptic, or, more precisely, into different regional dialects current in Upper Egypt in the late antique period. At some point in the fourth century, the translations were copied into manuscripts – ‘codices’, like modern print books rather than scrolls – along with other loosely related works. GTruth is the third in a collection of five works in one codex, GThomas the second of seven in another, and the two codices are among the twelve discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. The codex containing GTruth is designated as Nag Hammadi Codex I (NHC I), while GThomas is found in Nag Hammadi Codex II (NHC II). In both cases, further fragmentary manuscript evidence for the two texts came to light: parts of a second copy of GTruth are preserved in Nag Hammadi Codex XII, and the Coptic GThomas was found to correspond to three Greek fragments discovered some decades earlier at Oxyrhynchus.Footnote ¹ The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices has rightly been seen as equally significant to the almost simultaneous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.Footnote ² Each collection in its own way continues to transform our understanding of early Christianity.

The first modern edition of GTruth was published in two parts, the first in 1956 covering twenty-four of the twenty-eight pages it occupies in Codex I, followed by a supplement covering the missing four pages in 1961.Footnote ³ In the 1956 publication, a facsimile was provided along with a transcription of the Coptic text and translations into French, German, and English; shortly afterwards, German and English translations of the complete text appeared in other publications.Footnote ⁴ GTruth was the first of the Codex I texts to be edited and published, in recognition of its exceptional significance, but the lapse of over a decade since its discovery, together with the need for a supplement, hint at a complicated journey from discovery to publication. Following its discovery in 1945, Codex I was divided into two unequal parts which were sold separately to two Cairo manuscript dealers.Footnote ⁵ One of the two smuggled his part of the Codex out of Egypt, evading export controls, and tried unsuccessfully to sell the pages in his possession to institutions in the United States. It then remained in storage for several years in a secure location in Brussels. There it was identified by a scholar from the University of Utrecht, Gilles Quispel, who in 1952 successfully negotiated its purchase and its presentation to the Zurich-based Jung Institute, founded by and named after Carl Gustav Jung, the celebrated psychotherapist and public intellectual. The Jung Institute was (and is) concerned with training and research in psychology and psychotherapy, and the presentation reflected its founder’s conviction that his own psychological insights were anticipated in ancient ‘Gnosticism’, then understood as a religion distinct from Christianity and supposedly evidenced in the purchased manuscript.Footnote ⁶ Thus a substantial part of what is now known as ‘Nag Hammadi Codex I’ became ‘the Jung Codex’, which in a notable combination of flattery and cultural appropriation was said to have been ‘baptised in homage to the illustrious psychologist and intellectual’.Footnote ⁷ When GTruth (or most of it) was published in 1956, it predictably bore a dedication to the eighty-year-old Jung, who may perhaps have appreciated its ‘nightmare’ section in view of his interest in dream interpretation.Footnote ⁸ The so-called ‘Jung Codex’ was eventually transferred to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where it was reunited with the pages acquired by the second manuscript dealer, which had meanwhile been declared to be national property, along with the other Nag Hammadi codices.Footnote ⁹ In the 1977 facsimile edition, the four pages of GTruth absent from the 1956 edition are restored to their rightful place.Footnote ¹⁰

GTruth has thus been fully available in Coptic and in modern translations since the late 1950s. The same is true of GThomas, the Coptic text of which was published in 1959 with a German translation.Footnote ¹¹ Both works had been identified by their editorial teams as of exceptional importance, and their publication led to a flurry of scholarly articles and monographs. A bibliographical survey shows that GThomas was always the more popular of the two.Footnote ¹² In the years 1958–70, at least thirty-nine scholarly works were published with ‘Gospel of Truth’ in their title, ninety-nine with ‘Gospel of Thomas’. In both cases there is a falling-off in the years 1970–81 (GTruth ×15, GThomas ×30), but the preference for GThomas remains clear. That preference becomes still clearer with the passing of the decades. As of now, GThomas is firmly established on the scholarly research agenda while GTruth has dropped almost out of sight. GThomas is a subject of ongoing debate;Footnote ¹³ sporadic individual contributions are made to the study of GTruth,Footnote ¹⁴ yet, valuable as they are, sustained debate is absent. The relative difference in scholarly engagement represented by the earlier figures has become an absolute difference.

Not unrelated to this scholarly interest in GThomas is its impact beyond the walls of the academy. A Google search reveals that more than thirty popular treatments of this text are currently available, variously offering to decode, reveal, unlock, or unravel the Gnostic wisdom of Jesus, as expressed in his secret, original, and/or mystical teachings. GThomas is presented as a text for ‘spiritual seekers’, a source of ‘insights for spiritual living’, guiding the reader on ‘a journey to inner presence, self-understanding, and fullness of personal expression’. In GThomas, we encounter Jesus untouched by the church; this is a text that promises ‘the ultimate revelation’. In contrast to this intense investment in the Jesus of GThomas as a life-coach, GTruth features, if at all, only in collections of non-canonical, ‘alternative’ gospels.

Scholarly and popular preference for the one text over the other seem closely aligned. Some of the reasons for this preference are entirely understandable. On a popular level, GThomas may seem to offer a one-to-one relationship with an undogmatic Jesus that bypasses the need for church participation – an attractive prospect for many. It would probably be harder to market GTruth as a text for spiritual seekers. For scholars working on the synoptic gospels, it is easy to ignore GTruth but difficult to ignore GThomas, given the high volume of parallel passages that make this text virtually a fourth synoptic gospel. Originally published independently, GThomas has retained its independence from its manuscript context. While its relationship to the other six texts in Codex II is not without interest, the canonical gospels are its natural dialogue partners. Also published independently, GTruth has failed to maintain that independence. It is seen as just one among all the other ‘secret books of the Egyptian Gnostics’, the ‘Gnostic Scriptures’.Footnote ¹⁵ It is a key aim of the present book to show that this text too is open to – indeed, already engaged in – dialogue with New Testament texts and other early Christian literature. It is a serious work of early Christian theology. It does not belong on the esoteric fringes.

To gain a better understanding and appreciation of GTruth, we must identify and address some of the shortcomings of the mid-twentieth century scholarly work on this text. I shall discuss four of these in turn.

1. 1. The standard referencing system for this and other Nag Hammadi texts uses page and line numbers in the Coptic manuscript to identify a specific passage, unlike the chapter and verse system used for biblical texts. This might seem a trivial or purely technical issue, but it is not. Here is a sentence from the Prologue of GTruth as presented in the standard scholarly edition of the Codex I texts:

   … while the name of ǀ the gospel is the proclamation ǀ of hope, being discovery ǀ for those who search for him.Footnote ¹⁶

   This important passage is a definition of the term ‘gospel’. It is found at the start of the first full page of GTruth in Codex I, page 17. The translation keeps as close as possible to the line breaks in the Coptic manuscript, represented by the vertical lines which divide up a single statement into four units that have nothing to do with the sense of the passage. In the standard referencing system, this is therefore NHC I 17,1–4. The preceding statement, explaining that the title ‘Saviour’ points to the redemption that Jesus brings to those who were ignorant of the Father, straddles the final lines of page 16 and the first line of page 17. It is therefore referenced as 16,36–17,1. In contrast to the simplicity of biblical chapters and verses, this system is hopelessly cumbersome and awkward to use, even for specialists. It also ties a text that circulated in multiple (lost) copies over several centuries to its location within a single surviving manuscript. Worse still, it does damage to the translation itself, forcing the translator to reproduce the word order and syntax of the Coptic original to ensure that the English line breaks correspond to the Coptic ones. The inevitable result is a loss of intelligibility and effectiveness. Whether accurate or not, ‘the name ǀ of the gospel’ and ‘being discovery ǀ for those who search for him’ are poor English usage, leaving the reader with the impression that the text itself is confused and confusing – and so not worth seriously engaging with.

   In the referencing system adopted in this book and throughout the CGAT series, this passage is no longer ‘NHC I 17,1–4’ but ‘GTruth 1.4’, translated as: ‘… while “gospel” refers to the revelation of hope, so that those who seek him may find’.

2. 2. The familiar biblical ‘chapters’ derive from older systems of enumerated and titled sections, found in ancient manuscripts within the text itself and its table of contents. In the case of GTruth, scholars have struggled to identify distinct sections or any overarching structure. As Attridge and Macrae note,

   Discerning the structure and organizational principles of the Gospel of Truth is extremely difficult and virtually every commentator on the text has proposed his own analysis of the work. Difficulties arise from the fact that the themes and motifs of the text flow into one another without many apparent breaks or seams. After initiating reflections on a topic, the author often explores its implications and ramifications along a series of overlapping paths, but he may then return to his starting point and begin the exploratory process again.Footnote ¹⁷

   This is all true and indeed insightful, but the references to themes, motifs, and topics indicates the limitations of an analysis based on conceptual content. What is overlooked here is the structural role of language and imagery. The text presents an interlocking series of meditations, each of which is typically marked out from its context by concentrated use of one or more keywords that may occur sparingly or not at all elsewhere. A good example is found in the following passage (GTruth 8.1–9 in my translation), where the keywords are call and name:

   Those whose names he foreknew were called at the last, so that whoever possesses knowledge is one whose name the Father has spoken. For one whose name has not been uttered is ignorant; indeed, how will anyone hear if his name is not called? For whoever is ignorant until the end is the creature of forgetting, and he will vanish along with it. Otherwise why do these miserable ones have neither name nor voice? But whoever possesses knowledge is from above. When he is called he hears, he answers, and he turns to the one who calls him and ascends to him. And he knows how he is called, and in knowing he does the will of the one who called him, he wills to please him, he attains rest; each one receives his name. Whoever gains such knowledge knows where he comes from and where he is going. He knows like someone who was drunk but who turns from his drunkenness, and coming to himself he sets his affairs in order.

   This passage includes six occurrences each of call (as a verb or a noun) and of name. Despite the obvious theological weight of this passage, with its Pauline echoes,Footnote ¹⁸ call occurs only once elsewhere in GTruth (22.5), while name in the sense found here otherwise occurs just twice (15.9, 12). The quoted passage also includes repeated uses of know or knowledge (×7) and its opposite number, ignorance (×2). Unlike call and name, these terms recur throughout GTruth, for the role of Jesus, the Saviour, is precisely to deliver the elect from their state of ignorance and to draw them into the knowledge of the Father (cf. 1.2–3). The fundamental theme of the entire work (the transition from ignorance to knowledge) is expressed by way of a vocabulary specific to this passage, marking it out as a distinct section.

   As we shall see in Chapter 4, this use of keywords is characteristic of the author’s literary technique. It is language rather than theological topic that differentiates the sections of GTruth from each other and determines the structure of the work. Complaints about a lack of structure are the result of looking for it in the wrong place.

3. 3. A further barrier to an appreciation of GTruth on its own terms is the assumption that it distorts the teaching of the New Testament. In an early contribution dating from 1955, the Dutch scholar W. C. van Unnik argued that the author of GTruth ‘was acquainted with the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, Hebrews and Revelation’, and that ‘[t]he manner in which he treats these documents proves that they had authority for him’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the author’s ‘use’ of these New Testament texts, however, their meaning has been transformed by ‘the new Gnostic setting’.Footnote ²⁰ Thus,

   the Gospel of Truth is of the greatest importance for the historical development of Gnosticism, for what it tells us about the doctrines at which the attacks of the ecclesiastical writers were aimed …, but not for the thought-world of the New Testament writers itself.Footnote ²¹

   Van Unnik here reproduces exactly the view of the ‘ecclesiastical writers’ he mentions. On that view, a New Testament consisting of authoritative apostolic writings came into being very early and constitutes a single ‘thought-world’ from which, being a ‘Gnostic’, the author of GTruth fundamentally deviates. There are multiple problems with this account. Possible influences from one early Christian writing to another slightly later one do not establish the authoritative canonical status of the earlier writing; at most, they indicate that the earlier writing was in circulation and that the later author was aware of it. There is no unitary New Testament thought-world, safely cordoned off from that of GTruth after that text has been labelled as ‘Gnostic’. Far from proving the early existence of a New Testament, GTruth demonstrates its author’s full participation in the discourses attested in other early Christian writings. GTruth and GJohn exist on the same plane.

   That is emphatically not the view of C. K. Barrett, author of an impressive commentary on GJohn. In his article on ‘The Theological Vocabulary of the Fourth Gospel and of the Gospel of Truth’, Barrett uses the canonical gospel to identify the theological deficiencies he finds in the non-canonical work – or, as one might say, as a stick to beat it with. The Johannine author’s view of sin is contrasted with GTruth’s ‘almost complete failure to treat the subject at all’.Footnote ²² Equally absent from GTruth is ‘the eschatological motif which runs throughout the New Testament, including John’.Footnote ²³ GTruth teaches ‘a strictly amoral kind of predestination, quite different from John’s.Footnote ²⁴ John maintains a proper distinction between humanity and God, whereas the tendency in GTruth is to demonstrate continuity.Footnote ²⁵ In contrast to the Johannine and New Testament teaching that God’s love is motivated only by free grace, ‘[i]t scarcely exaggerates to say that in EV [Evangelium Veritatis, GTruth] … God’s love is erotic desire for what is ultimately a part of himself’.Footnote ²⁶ Barrett’s observations about the theology of GTruth and its (fascinating and intricate) relationship to GJohn are inaccurate and distorted. Like van Unnik, his aim is to show that scholars of the New Testament have nothing to gain from the newly recovered text other than confirmation of the privileged status of their object of study.

   In exploring the potential for dialogue between GTruth and other early Christian writings such as GJohn, we must abandon the assumption that the non-canonical text is somehow fundamentally different from its canonical counterparts. While it is true that New Testament texts enjoy a privileged status in ecclesial and theological contexts that GTruth can never have, that distinction is the result of different histories and is not inherent to the texts themselves.

4. 4. A further hindrance to understanding GTruth on its own terms can be traced back to the one patristic theologian who does seem to have known – or known of – this text. That theologian was Irenaeus, who referred to a text entitled ‘Gospel of Truth’ and subjected it to a brief and hostile book review that continues to influence modern interpreters. Pre-eminent among the heretics whose views Irenaeus sought to expose and counter were the ‘Valentinians’, followers of an Alexandrian Christian thinker who was active in Rome from around 135 ce and who remained influential some decades later, when Irenaeus wrote his five-volume work Against Heresies. According to Irenaeus, it was followers of Valentinus who produced the so-called ‘Gospel of Truth’ to promote their own perversions of the true apostolic faith.Footnote ²⁷ Irenaeus’s primary concern throughout his work was to defend the claim that the God revealed in Jesus was to be identified with the creator deity of Jewish scripture – a claim rejected by most of Irenaeus’s ‘heretical’ opponents. In summarising the Valentinian theology, however, Irenaeus highlights a different feature, the world of the ‘aeons’ (or ‘eternities’, ‘eternal ones’). As presented by Irenaeus, these ‘aeons’ represent the thoughts or ideas of a transcendent deity who in himself is beyond language yet generates such personified concepts as ‘Grace’, Mind’, ‘Truth’, ‘Life’, and so on, arranged in an orderly hierarchy and making up the realm of the pleroma or ‘fullness’. The prominent location of Irenaeus’s summary at the start of his great work means that the Valentinian doctrine of the ‘aeons’ is equally prominent in modern accounts of ‘Gnosticism’.

   Irenaeus rightly claimed that GTruth was known in Valentinian circles, but he also speculated that it was produced within those circles and was therefore a Valentinian work. Under Irenaeus’s influence, the scholars who first worked on the recovered text in the 1950s assumed that it is indeed a product of Valentinian theology – perhaps even authored by Valentinus himself, as van Unnik already claimed in 1955.Footnote ²⁸ Yet van Unnik notes that the structured Valentinian hierarchy of named aeons is absent from GTruth, and he concludes that Valentinus must have authored this text ‘before the development of the typically Gnostic dogmas’.Footnote ²⁹ While it is true that the few surviving fragments of Valentinus’s writings do not mention a doctrine of aeons, neither do they suggest any strong connections with GTruth.Footnote ³⁰ Nevertheless, most scholars have taken on trust Irenaeus’s assertion of GTruth’s Valentinian origins, thus locating the text in a mid-second century context and significantly later than almost all of the New Testament texts. Whether it is thought to be composed by Valentinus himself or a later Valentinian author, it remains the case that, as Hans-Martin Schenke has stated, GTruth ‘demonstrates no definite and specific Valentinian doctrines or motifs’.Footnote ³¹ Schenke also rightly notes that a near neighbour of GTruth in Nag Hammadi Codex I, the so-called Tripartite Tractate, is clearly influenced both by GTruth and by Valentinian theology.Footnote ³² This confirms Irenaeus’s claim that Valentinian authors used and valued this text, but it tells us nothing about its origins.

   The hypothesis of a Valentinian origin will be more thoroughly discussed in Chapters 3 and 7 of the present book. At present it is enough to note the potential weakness of this hypothesis, in spite of the scholarly consensus in its favour, and to proceed to read and study GTruth on its own terms.

   GTruth has been described as a ‘homily’, an address to an audience in a liturgical setting. It also envisages a wider circle of readers or hearers, which places it in the vicinity of early Christian letters addressed to communities rather than to individuals. But it is also ‘gospel’, at least as the term is defined by Origen, the great and controversial Alexandrian theologian, writing some decades after Irenaeus. Near the start of his multi-volume commentary on the Gospel of John, Origen explains that ‘gospel’ refers to ‘speech conveying an announcement of events that, rightly and because of the benefits they bring, give joy to the hearer on receiving the announcement’ (1.27).Footnote ³³ Although there is no evidence that Origen was familiar with GTruth, his definition almost seems to paraphrase its opening: ‘The Gospel of Truth is joy to those who have received grace from the Father of truth.’ Both statements highlight the positive impact of a reported event on the hearer or reader, and both authors are concerned with the same event, the making-known of the Father through Jesus, the Saviour. That is the ‘benefit’ that evokes ‘joy’ in the recipient. Origen does not insist that a text claiming to be ‘gospel’ must follow the canonical pattern – a biographical account of Jesus’s ministry of teaching and healing culminating in his arrest, trial, death, and resurrection.Footnote ³⁴ ‘Gospel’ is defined in terms of its effect on its addressee rather than any specific literary form. That is also the view of the unknown author of the Gospel of Truth.